Society

In March 2020, a profile of the typical Covid victim emerged from Italy. The average decedent was eighty years old, with approximately three comorbidities such as heart disease, obesity or diabetes. The young had little to worry about; the survival rate for the vast majority of the population was well over 99 percent. That portrait never significantly changed. The early assessments of Covid out of Italy have remained valid through today. And so it will prove with the Omicron variant. The data out of South Africa, after five weeks of Omicron spread, suggest that Omicron should be a cause for celebration, not fear.

Early in our marriage, my wife vetoed the idea of celebrating Christmas in the Alpine tradition: by having Santa Claus accompanied by Krampus, your friendly neighborhood ice-demon. Of course, Mrs. Davis was amenable to the idea of a horned monster beating our children with birch rods. At least when they’re naughty. Then she realized that, since neither of us are Swiss, it would technically be cultural appropriation. That was the end of that. Speaking of demons, here’s a little Christmas meditation for you: more Americans believe in the Devil than in God. According to a recent survey, 56 percent of us believe that “Satan is not merely a symbol of evil but is a real spiritual being and influences human lives.” That’s compared to 51 percent who believe in an all-powerful Creator.

Herman Melville spent several weeks as an involuntary guest of the Typee, Marquesan Islanders known for their fierce cannibalistic ways and their exquisite tattoos. It was 1842 and Melville was a rebellious twenty-two-year-old hand who had jumped ship from a whaling vessel. Several years later, in his first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, Melville recounted his deep fear that his hosts would tattoo his face. Facial tattoos were common among the islanders. Some Westerners got facially tattooed as well, but those were men who had relinquished their homes and become the original beachcombers, white men who belonged neither here nor there. Tattooing in general was hardly a respectable thing.

After realizing that offshore wind turbines only supply about 2 percent of all US grid energy (and about 1 percent worldwide), the Biden administration has decided it needs a big push. It hasn’t cogitated that just maybe there’s a reason for this. There is: it’s called “physics.” The administration’s goal is a lofty thirty gigawatts of offshore wind operating by 2030, compared to currently just forty-two megawatts of offshore wind from a grand total of seven turbines. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts so we’d have to increase output by about 700 times. By comparison, the largest US nuclear plant produces almost four gigawatts of power, while a Japanese one produces twice that.

“UN Global Climate Poll: ‘The People’s Voice Is Clear – They Want Action.’” So ran a typical headline in the British newspaper the Guardian in January. Yet this month, a poll released as world leaders met at the Glasgow Climate Change Conference prompted a very different Guardian headline: “Few Willing To Change Lifestyle To Save The Planet, Climate Survey Finds.” Huh? Yes, surveys are essentially universal in showing people worldwide are terribly concerned about Global Climate Change (GCC) and support efforts to mitigate it, often no matter how drastic. But those polls may reflect a false perception.

When I first began thinking about restarting my email newsletter, Prufrock, after a nine-month break (during which I cycled the Blue Ridge Parkway twice, slept until six every morning, and read novels), one option I considered was Substack. I started Prufrock in 2013 when there were very few newsletters, especially on the right. It was basically Ben Domenech’s The Transom, Michael Brendan Dougherty’s The Slurve, and Prufrock. Sometime around 2016, everyone had a newsletter. Then came Substack in 2017, which grabbed people’s attention in 2019 when Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes agreed to run their new publication, the Dispatch, exclusively on the platform.

I have been writing a lot about the politically inspired perversion of language. The name “Orwell” crops up in any such discussion, as does the word “Newspeak,” that twisted mode of language that Orwell outlined in the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four. The goal of Newspeak, Orwell said, was to replace standard English with a sharply diminished patois whose linguistic poverty was its prime political advantage. By reducing the suppleness of language, the elites who controlled society hoped also to reduce dissent — not only the activity of dissent, but also the thoughts and emotions that guided it. This has been a perennial dream of budding totalitarians, from the French Revolution to the varieties of communist tyranny.

Not all inventions change the world. But some do — and they do it by greatly lowering the cost of a fundamental economic input. This inevitably causes an economic revolution that brings about a new political and social order by opening previously impossible economic opportunities,  creating vast new wealth in the process. We are in the middle of such a revolution today, thanks to the microprocessor, which first came to market in 1972 and really took off with the introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s. The microprocessor, a dirt-cheap computer on a chip, hugely reduced the cost of storing, retrieving and manipulating information. Computing power that cost $1,000 in the 1950s today costs a fraction of a cent.

Pope Francis met with Joe Biden on Friday. It’s always a boost for a world leader to be snapped smiling with the Pope. But for Biden, who flashes rosary beads during stump speeches and has a habit of crossing himself when talking about his political opponents, the visit may have involved a presidential fib. Since Inauguration Day, Biden has been locked in a dispute with America’s Catholic bishops over his public support for abortion — a position which developed in curious tandem with his rise up the Democratic ticket during the last election cycle, even while B-roll of him hugging nuns played in his campaign ads.

President Joe Biden is set for his rendezvous with climate destiny at the Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow on Monday. The president left Washington on Thursday empty-handed after congressional Democrats abandoned an attempt to put his infrastructure and climate package to a vote. “I need you to help me. I need your votes,” Biden implored them. “I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week.” At least he wasn’t invoking anything as serious as the future of the planet to get their backing. Nancy Pelosi weighed in, according to Politico’s Laura Barrón-López, telling her colleagues that overseas parliamentary leaders had asked whether American democracy can survive.

“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again: the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded ‘gain-of-function’ research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”  That was Dr Anthony Fauci during a May 2021 congressional hearing. It kicked off a months-long national media effort to frame questions around gain-of-function research and US-taxpayer-funded virus manipulation as a Royal Rumble between Fauci and Senator Rand Paul. When he testifies or sits for friendly network interviews, Fauci depends on semantics.

Anyone wishing to appreciate the nature of our two-tier society needs only to contrast the fate of St Anthony Fauci with that, say, of General Mike Flynn or any of the dozens of political prisoners who are, many of them, being held without charge in appalling conditions in a Washington, D.C. prison even as I write. Fauci has been a carbuncle on the countenance of American life at least since he help spread the myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the 1980s. The new Chinese flu was custom made for his brand of panic-mongering and totalitarian posturing. Just a few weeks ago, he was saying that it was “too early” to say whether we would be allowed to gather for Christmas.

On Tuesday, Frances Haugen, speaking to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, compared Facebook to tobacco and opioids while pushing for similar regulations. Haugen, a 'whistleblower' who came forward after Facebook dissolved her team and who admits she never worked on child safety during her time at Facebook, told a terrifying story about an app that harms young girls. Social media is like a drug. We hear this all the time. We’re powerless addicts in the face of its influence. We need to keep the kids safe from it. But is it? And do we? I used to call myself a Twitter addict. It’s the first thing I check each morning and the last thing I look at at night.

Nye Bevan, the British socialist, famously denounced the nuclear unilateralists in his party for sending a future foreign secretary 'naked into the conference chamber’. Unless Congress passes the stalled budget reconciliation bill, President Biden will fly to the COP26 Glasgow climate conference, which starts in less than three weeks’ time, in a similar state of undress. Before the Paris agreement in 2015, UN climate change conferences were about hammering out the texts of binding climate treaties and agreeing to emissions reduction targets. All that has changed. Climate change targets are now decided in advance by individual countries in their Nationally Determined Contributions, draining climate conferences of drama and turning them into a giant show-and-tell.

'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922 Wittgenstein wrote that as an ontological and epistemological foundation for his larger belief in freedom of speech. He who controls the language also controls reality, something that today's left understands brilliantly, even devilishly. America historically has not limited freedom of thought and speech, and the resulting clash of ideas has improved our national discourse. The language police makes us weaker intellectually by limiting the world in which we live. The language around climate change and the green movement is one more area the left wants to control, especially given that trillions of dollars in spending are on the line.